


Shore Leave

by Laylah



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Backstory, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-10
Updated: 2008-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:19:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And one of the other players is watching him, a hulking blond brute with shoulders like a draft horse’s and a slow burn in his eyes. Tyki smiles at him as they play, leans a little too close, lets his fingers brush the back of the guy’s hand when he reaches for the dice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shore Leave

When they make berth in New Orleans, they draw lots to see who’ll go ashore first. It’s a petty thing, not worth cheating over — he’ll get his turn, one way or another, and being on shipboard is still fun, too — but Tyki still draws with the first batch.

“Of course you did,” Jake the quartermaster says. He smiles, even though Tyki’s card playing cost him nearly half his pay on their last voyage. “Tell us you’re at least unlucky in love.”

“Terribly,” Tyki says obligingly. “There was a girl in Tahiti on my first voyage who broke my heart. I’ve never been the same since.” He smiles. He’s never been to Tahiti, but he thinks he’d like to, if the Earl will leave him alone long enough for a trip like that.

“Hah! Take my word for it,” says Hans, who drew first leave, too. “There’s not a girl in the world who can compare to the ones on Bourbon Street.”

Of course, New Orleans promises to be interesting, too. “I’ll have to go looking,” Tyki says, as the boys lower the gangplank so they can go ashore. “I hear too long without a girl can make a man a little crazy.” He winks at Tristan, the cabin boy, the nearest to a girl he’s had in months, and Tristan blushes.

When he gets dry land under his feet he doesn’t go looking for a girl at all. It’s a good time sometimes, sure, but he doesn’t think it’s really what he wants tonight. New Orleans is rough around the edges, young and lawless in a way that European cities have forgotten, and that’s what Tyki wants right now. All the life this place has to offer.

He drinks absinthe in fancy bars and bourbon in squalid ones, gets himself thrown out of a gambling den when his luck’s a little too good, finds another game by the dockside when the sun’s going down and the day laborers are through their work and looking for some way to pass the night. He teaches them curses he learned in Lisbon, and they tell him how to swear like the natives of the swamp that holds the city hostage, and he wins at dice just often enough, but not so often that he loses his new friends.

And one of the other players is watching him, a hulking blond brute with shoulders like a draft horse’s and a slow burn in his eyes. Tyki smiles at him as they play, leans a little too close, lets his fingers brush the back of the guy’s hand when he reaches for the dice. Every once in a while this kind of thing gets him in trouble, or would if he didn’t have a dark side to fall back on, but he has a good feeling about tonight. He offers his name in the conversation, gets the other guy’s in return, grins at how vibrantly _savage_ it sounds.

When the game breaks up for lack of light, the players taking their winnings with them as they go in search of other vices to spend them on, Tyki turns into an alley, and his bruiser follows.

“You knew what you were doing,” he says.

“I did,” Tyki agrees. “Are you taking me up on it?”

They fuck right there in the alley, against the wall, a show of raw demanding power that suits this rash young country, this city of outlaws. Tyki lets his back get scraped raw against the wall, clings to shoulders twice as broad as his own, bites hard enough to bruise when he comes.

The Earl calls him up for another job before the _Winter Wolf_ is ready to leave port again, so he has to give upon sailing for now. The job takes him to London, into the stinging yellow haze of the Fog and the cramped alleys of Whitechapel, and he doesn’t think of New Orleans again for months.

It’s Rhode who brings it up, tells him the Earl’s found somebody interesting there. “Somebody who might become a new brother for us,” she says, kicking her feet over the abyss inside the ark. She smiles. “Some guy who’s been a dockworker down there.”

“A dockworker, huh?” Tyki says, looking up from the cigarette he’s rolling. Life is funny, it really is. “What’s his name?”


End file.
